Welcome to Love and Abuse, the show about helping you identify poisonous communication and toxic behavior.

You deserve to be treated with respect and kindness.

That's why it's important that you learn to pinpoint manipulative and controlling behavior so that you keep your power and your sanity.

I'm your host, Paul Koliani.

Music power and your sanity. I'm your host, Paul Koliani. Welcome back to another show. I want to share with you something that I learned a long time ago,

and it's in the world of hypnosis.

I have been certified by two schools of hypnosis, and I learned a lot about the subconscious

mind.

And that is very, very helpful when it comes to learning how people influence you.

And so I became fascinated by the subconscious mind

and fascinated by influence, both ethical and unethical. Not that I practiced the unethical,

at least not consciously, because I've certainly had my moments, especially in my marriage,

where I was not very ethical. I was a good manipulator. And so coming out of that

and looking back, I can see the techniques or methods that I used and I didn't even know I was doing it.

But coming out of the world of hypnosis, there is a term called the confusion technique. And manipulators,

of all types, will use confusion to put you in sort of a trance-like state. And what I mean by

that, I don't know if you've ever listened to someone's monologue or lecture or just sat there waiting for someone to stop talking and they

were talking about something that didn't quite make it into your logical brain. You didn't

understand it. You just sat there going, well, I can catch some of this, but not all of it. Like a highly

scientific lecture if you're not scientific or

someone talking about how to fix a car in a lot of detail and you have no idea what they're

talking about because they're using car terminology. You can get confused. You can start to zone out

...